March 26, 2001 (EIRNS)--EIR News Service has announced the release of two 90-minute videotapes from the ICLC/Schiller Institute Presidents' Day Conference, Feb. 17-18, 2001. The conference, held in Reston, Virginia, took place at a turning point in American and world history, as the global economy began its rapid plunge into what even the major international press are now calling "the first global depression" in history. This depression had been forecast by LaRouche since the 1971 paradigm shift in the United States, brought on by the Southern Stratetgy of Richard M. Nixon and his Wall Street and Confederate backers. In his keynote speech, entitled "A Branch in the Road of History," renowned economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, focusses on the question of why the Bush administration itself is doomed, and how Americans can keep this administration from taking the entire nation, and world, down with it.

In his address, LaRouche stated: "For 35 years, the United States has been destroyed. For 35 years, the economy of much of the world has been destroyed. This can't go on forever: We've now reached what I shall indicate to you today, is the end-game.... And the question before us is, what can we do, to prevent this disaster? Is this disaster inevitable?

"Can we 'put the toothpaste back in the tube'? I say, we can!"

Disease of Romanticism

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her keynote speech the following day, delivered an powerful attack on "Romanticism," which she identified as the mother of the "Cult of Ugliness." Romanticism, not what most people think of today: a candlelit dinner for two; the sun setting over the Pacific, etc. But, the ideology of the Roman Empire, which is where it gets its name. The insanity of the vox populi -- the manipulated masses who have been bought off by modern-day "bread-and-circuses" as were the rabble of ancient Rome.

"The reason why people don't understand things and do not look through, is because they are affected by the disease of emotional Romanticism. People have lost the ability to look through, to differentiate between true morality, and that which only attempts to be morality. That has to do with the fact that they have lost the judgment, that Truth, Beauty, and the Good, and Reason, are one and the same thing."

Counterposed to this, Zepp-LaRouche said, is the concept put forward by the German national poet Friedrich Schiller, who proved that "beauty is a necessary condition for mankind."

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